


It's Called a Heart

by objectlesson



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Child Abuse, D/s undertones, Dubious Consent, Hand & Finger Kink, M/M, power
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 13:08:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3210290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ciel sometimes tries to imagine a version of himself where is soul is not shaped by Sebastian’s hunger, where his bones are not shaped by Sebastian’s hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Called a Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Jesus christ. My partner and I binge watched the shit out of Kuroshitsuji this past month. I really, really didn't want another pairing to ship, but these two are just so easy, so here I am. A few notes: this is the third anime I've ever seen, so I'm ignorant to a lot of conventions/tropes/traditions, both within the media form itself, and likely within the fandom, so I forgive any weirdness which results from my uneducated position. Also, the show itself doesn't try very hard to be historically accurate, so I didn't either. I mostly wanted to talk about Sebastian's hands because every time he takes his gloves off I scream, and imagine Ciel is doing the same thing, only grumpily and internally. 
> 
> This takes place somewhere in Season one, probably before anyone important dies. I haven't read the Manga so I don't know if it happens before or after the canon divergence. I don't own anything, including the title which I stole from a Depeche Mode song I found to be fitting. Enjoy!
> 
> Note: ALL SEX WITH CHILDREN CIEL'S AGE IS RAPE, NON-CON, ABUSE, ETC. I do not ever ever ever ever condone this type of thing. Ciel is incapable of giving consent as an abused child, so every sex scene in any story I've ever written in this fandom is coerced and essentially non consensual. Read at your own risk knowing that just because this is a WORK OF FICTION about ANIME CHARACTERS, doesn't mean the dynamic therein is ok.

Ciel Phantomhive watches the sunlight filter through his Earl Grey’s rising tendrils of steam, imagining a world of twisting fingers and grasping hands in the vaporous swirl. He does not want to think of hands as often as he does. However, there are many things Ciel does not wish to think of, things which haunt his dreams regardless. Hands are among the more benign of these things, so he supposes he should be thankful for their subtle invasion. 

He snaps his gaze to more concrete things, to the rim of his tea-cup with its white porcelain, detailed in gold filigree. Behind him he can sense Sebastian’s comforting omnipresence, like the weight of a vast black wing covering him, blocking out the sunlight and cloaking them in a forever darkness. Ciel sighs. Perhaps he would not think of hands so much if it were not for Sebastian’s unfaltering proximity. 

The proximity, of course, is Ciel’s own doing. His own demand, even. It’s infuriating, how every single infinitesimal thing which irritates him about Sebastian is, in the end, his own fault. Sebastian does only what Ciel orders, acts only within the constraints of Ciel’s desires. Therefore, it’s only his own desires which irritate him, not Sebastian himself. Ciel is left barking at his own reflection, hung by the length of the leash Sebastian is tethered to.

Ciel hardens his gaze, noticing that the steam is no longer rising from his teacup with the same coruscating elegance as his butler’s maddeningly gloved hands. 

_Who owns who?_ Ciel asks himself for the one thousandth time since ceding claim to his own soul. 

“Young master,” Sebastian says, stepping closer. “Your tea is getting cold.” 

A flicker of rage, wild and unnamed, rises and ignites in Ciel’s chest. He reaches out and pushes his tea cup and saucer to the edge of his desk, brow knit. “I no longer desire Earl Grey,” he snaps, feeling hopeless. 

A droplet of tea sloshes onto the hardwood in the process, and before Ciel even has time to register this Sebastian has swept down to his shoulder like an angel, procuring a linen kerchief from his pocket and wiping the blot of darkness away so quickly it was as if it had never fallen at all. Ciel blinks, teeth grinding in childish, unfettered fury. 

“What do you desire as a replacement, my Lord?” Sebastian asks, without missing a beat. He folds the kerchief, a motion like the wings of moths, smooth and invisible. 

Ciel shuts his unhidden eye. “Nothing,” is somewhat of a lie. 

\---

Ciel is not always certain that Sebastian is truly his. Especially when he is alone, catching his reflection in the window or the polished handrails of the staircase, seeing only a boy’s face and single, unmarked eye. A boy who cannot tie his own cravat, who cannot cook for himself or take a carriage into the city, who cannot avenge the curse bestowed upon his family without the devil holding his child’s hand clasped firmly in a white glove.

It seems absurd, on some days, that someone as small and fragile as he commands the power of hell. Especially when Hell is so tall, handsome, competent, obsidian. 

It’s proof that Ciel craves. That is what he tells himself. Proof of their contract, proof that Sebastian belongs truly and totally to him. He knows that proof lies etched upon the right hand of Hell, five pointed and bone deep. 

He just never gets to _see_ it. Sebastian nearly always wears his gloves, silk and immaculate, just as Ciel must also cover his eye. It is a matter of necessity, of course. But beneath the square of black, Ciel _knows_ his eye is forever changed. He knows his soul is owed, every time his lashes scrape delicately against the inside of blackness he _knows_ , he is reminded with stark clarity that the innermost substance of his interior does not truly belong to him. But. Sebastian’s hands remain hidden, proof obscured, concealed. 

It is probably not the only reason why Ciel spends the evenings waiting impatiently to be bathed by his butler. But it is one of them. 

This particular evening, the bathroom in all its slick marble splendor is hazy with steam. Ciel watches with an impassive mask as Sebastian methodically unbuttons, shucks, and neatly folds his waistcoat, then swiftly rolls up his sleeves to the bend of his elbow. The gloves come last, tugged off his right index finger first by a line of straight white teeth. Ciel looks away, hair falling into his face. He can endure a moment more of purgatory, if it will make the revelation of his ownership sweeter. 

Sebastian stands behind him, pale bare hands sliding the robe from his shoulders with such certainty. And there, upon his right hand like an oath, like a brand. Five pointed and bone deep. His eye’s twin, passing before his gaze as Sebastian palms down his ribcage, guiding him to the clawfoot tub. A lick of heat and confusion flares in Ciel’s gut, as it often does, and he braces himself against it. It feels like bracing himself against pain, something as easy and familiar as breathing, as the three syllable song of his surname. 

As Sebastian washes his hair, Ciel occasionally reaches up, linking narrow soapy fingers with those of his butler and dragging his right hand down to his chest and into the bathwater. Again and again studying the lines and intricacies of their agreement, attempting to memorize it. 

_Proof_ he thinks, blinking, as Sebastian stays silent, thumb resting where the Phantomhive blue diamond usually rests. 

\---

For someone who believes the revelation of confusion is a sign of weakness, Ciel is quite often confused. Confused about the line between boy and man, the line between man and monster. Confused over what it means to be human, if being human is possessing a soul and his own soul is something possessed by a demon. He is confused over the feelings which roil and collect inside him like the filth which collects at the banks of the Thames. He is confused over the nuance discerning hatred from hunger and necessity from love. He is confused about Sebastian.  
Sebastian, who will and must do anything for him. Out of hatred, or hunger? Necessity, or love? Sebastian, who does not act the way Ciel expected a contracted demon from hell would act when he contracted a demon from hell. Sebastian, who is always surprising him. 

Ciel lies in his expansive bed, tangled in silk sheets of confusion like the threads of a spider’s web. He rolls from one side to another, air expelled from his lungs in great huffs as he rolls about, dissatisfied with every position. Sleep seems futile, tonight, when his bed is too large and too cold and the tight, coiled sickness he endures like pain smolders relentlessly in his abdomen. He is confused about Sebastian. 

Sebastian, who will lean in so closely to Ciel’s ear when telling secrets that sometimes, he can feel the heat of breath lick up against the fine wisps of hair which fall there, and sometimes feel the brush of lips against the pulse of his neck. Sebastian, who will trace the lines of Ciel’s _other_ brand when bathing him, not idly but deliberately, like he is attempting to read the history of torture like a menu to his future meal. Sebastian, who will slap his _gloved_ hand across Ciel’s impertinent and impassioned mouth in moments of required silence. Sebastian, who will push _gloved_ fingers inside that mouth, past Ciel’s lips, forcing him to taste the faint memories of furniture polish, soap, tea leaves, spice amid the dry drag of cotton. Sebastian, who in these moments compels Ciel’s mind to grow blank and static-sick and alarmed and his knees to buckle with nameless overwhelm. Sebastian, who confuses him, who fills him with hate, hunger, need, love. 

Ciel rubs his face into his pillow, his hips into his sheets. He is confused. 

\---

 

Ciel sometimes tries to imagine a version of himself where is soul is not shaped by Sebastian’s hunger, where his bones are not shaped by Sebastian’s hands. It feels impossible. Like attempting to hold onto the last remnants of a dream upon waking, or grasping for memories charred and smoking from the burnt skeleton of a fire-hollowed mansion. The contract rendered Ciel reborn, and the self he was before then-- before Sebastian-- seems as fleeting and finite as ash. 

Eventually, he stops trying. There is no fraction of himself left unsold, and Sebastian’s quiet, constant company is an ever-preset reminder of this fact. It’s inescapable, and what’s even more troublesome, it’s becoming welcome, even revered. Ciel begins to feel incomplete when Sebastian is not hovering about the peripheries of his vision like a shadow. After all, without the frame of Sebastian’s steadfast loyalty, his own quest for revenge is merely a foolish wish, translucent and childlike. Sebastian gives him the means, gives him meaning. Without Sebastian, Ciel cannot make sense of himself. 

Sebastian feeds his rage, finds his darkness beautiful in its consumptive purity. Sebastian makes Ciel and everything Ciel dreams of a reality, a solid thing amid a world of smoke. Sometimes it terrifies him, how completely and totally reliant he is upon his butler. How little his money and his family’s name actually mean when held beneath a microscope. Who is he, without his revenge, which can only be fashioned into truth by Sebastian’s hands? Who is he, with a soul so black and helpless if that soul is not meant to be devoured by Hell himself? Who owns who? 

But then, Ciel will nod off in the carriage on some long trip back from London, lulled to sleep by the rhythmic clatter of hooves against cobblestone and gentle rocking. There he will wake, small and crumpled against Sebastian’s shoulder, a boy again with a slick of drool to be wiped from his chin, a boy safe within the crook of his butler’s arm. Its times like these when Ciel does not wonder who he is without Sebastian, and instead rejoices that he does not have to be without Sebastian at all. Inside his deepest of selves, Ciel is unable to imagine the agony of being alone. Of being without him. 

_Who owns who?_ Ciel will wonder over and over again, as he watches his reflection in the stone of his family’s ring, eyes narrowed and jaw set. There are days he seeks proof. Days he requires _certainty_ that he is, indeed, The Earl of Phantomhive, and he is the one who will call checkmate, in the end. But then, there are the days when he blinks, sighing, and settles back into the crisp, starched lapel of Sebastian’s waistcoat, and thinks with a stubborn frivolity, _who cares?_

\---

Sebastian is kneeling between Ciel’s knees, head bent as if he were in prayer. It’s far too early and Ciel is only half-awake, groggy and sluggish, still recovering from dreams hot and half-remembered and flickering with hellfire. His body feels warm, not his own, and Sebastian’s fingers move deftly to unbutton his silk nightshirt. It slithers to the sheets, and Ciel shivers without it. 

The grey morning light catches on Sebastian’s ink-black hair, and idly, without even thinking Ciel reaches out to touch it. His fingers brush against feather softness for a moment when he realizes what he’s doing and snaps his hand back, eyes wide. 

Sebastian looks up at him, face impassive, unmoved. “Young Master?” 

Ciel says nothing, only drops his gaze to his own lap, lips flattened into a thin line. Behind the jagged sheet of his sleep-mussed hair, he knows his cheeks have colored. It’s a foolish, regrettable thing, the liminal realm between sleep and waking, he thinks. 

“Did you mean to ask something of me?” Sebastian says, and his voice feels like a flame licking at the hollow of Ciel’s bony hip, low and careful and perhaps, ever so slightly, _mocking_. Ciel’s eyes flick decidedly up to meet Sebastian’s, defiant, determined. Yes. He meant to ask something. That was what he was doing, what his hand was beckoning for beyond his will or logic. Quickly, before Sebastian could smile or lick his lips or do something equally cruel, Ciel inventa some absurd question to save him from further explanation. 

“Sebastian. Do you take pleasure in your profession?” is what comes out. It hangs in the morning air between them for a moment, and again, Ciel shivers, acutely aware that he’s sitting in nothing but a loose tangle of his bed sheets, barefoot and bare chested, before his kneeling butler. His throat clicks as he swallows, and he wishes Sebastian would cover him up, touch him, tug the gloves from his hands and reach into the light.

“I do,” Sebastian answers, without raising his eyebrows or otherwise indicating he is thrown or surprised by Ciel’s inquiries. “I derive great pleasure and satisfaction from acting as the Earl of Phantomhive’s Butler.” 

“And in serving me?” Ciel asks, curtly. 

Sebastian does not look up, just takes one of Ciel’s narrow, pale feet within a palm and briskly tugs a sheer white stocking over it. Ciel flexes his toes against the cotton, waiting. 

“My greatest pleasure is to serve you, my lord,” Sebastian answers, long fingers tugging the stocking up Ciel’s smooth calf, stopping just short of his knee. There, his hands linger. Ciel stares at them, imagining the flesh beneath the gloves, the white skin and its etching of truth, the broad knuckles and easy slide flesh over cool blue veins. Something alive in him aches, and he clenches young fists in sheets. 

“What pleasure do you derive from it? Is it the knowledge that at the end of this, your payment will be my soul? Or do you take pleasure in the daily routine of serving me? Of buckling my shoes and pouring my tea and--” Ciel falls abruptly silent as Sebastian’s sure, steady palm slides inches higher, onto the outside of his quaking thigh, drawn tight and pebbled with gooseflesh. Mind flatlining, Ciel’s breath catches and stops. 

“Though I do think of your soul often, it is not the driving force of my day to day responsibilities to you,” Sebastian says quietly, looking carefully up at Ciel through his hair, face placid save for the slightest edge of a smile curling at the left corner of his lips. His eyes, usually the most sanguine of browns, are alight with a crimson flame, and Ciel feels as if he is igniting, as if he must escape from the blistering prison of his own flesh before he is consumed by Sebastian’s gaze completely. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but he cannot look away. Sebastian’s grip on his leg tightens almost imperceptibly, and Ciel wants so desperately to ask, _then what? if not for my soul, why do you endure the endless parade of orders, the endless ennui of humanity?_ But there are no words, just his butler’s gloved fingers tracing the curve where his thigh and hips meet. 

Ciel is shaking, eyes wide and stricken, pink mouth parted as if expecting something to fill it. He cannot bear the world of sensation blooming before him like blood from a gunshot wound. He is poised to come apart, to shatter radially from the point at which Sebastian is gripping him, when instead, everything else shatters, and he is left cursed, intact. Sebastian lets go, and stands. 

“Young Master,” he says, eyes cast to the tight, terrified junction of Ciel’s pubescent thighs, hidden beneath a crumple of white linen sheets. “It seems you need a moment to compose yourself. I will step outside and return shortly.” He bows succinctly, then turns on his heel to leave. 

It’s only after Ciel hears Sebastian’s footsteps disappear that he lets out the breath he was inadvertently holding. He collapses backwards onto his bed, eyes shut tight enough to see stars, hand blindly seeking the heat in his lap. 

\---

While working to dissolve a dubious prostitution ring in the East end of London as per her Majesty’s orders, Ciel gets knocked unconscious by a john’s enthused uppercut. He falls to the gutter, head pounding miraculously and vision obscured by static and crimson. Before anything save for his knees can touch the garbage-strewn back alley cobblestone, Sebastian has swept him away and into his arms. He pushes off from the ground and takes off like a crow into the darkness. 

The London night sweeps past them like the tide, ruffling Ciel’s hair and making the impact bruise forming on his temple sting and throb. His ears pressurize from the sudden altitude change, and he desperately grips Sebastian’s broad shoulders; everything is tilting, everything spins. The world smells like Sebastian’s waistcoat, fine knit linen and blood and unfathomably, home. Sebastian’s hands are clasped to hold him, Sebastian’s lips are in his hair. Ciel blinks, dizzy. 

Looking down hazily at the rapidly diminishing scene of squalor below, Ciel catches sight of the john shaking his fist at them, face small and white and upturned towards the sky. Then, rolling his cheek against Sebastian’s warm chest, he blacks out. 

He wakes in his own bed, dressed in his night clothes and tucked in neatly. He notices he can see from both eyes, the marked and unmarked. One aches, the other does not. Disoriented, he sits up, squinting in the dim candlelight and very aware of the swollen sensitivity on the right side of his face. “Sebastian?” He asks, as always, the first word from his mouth each morning like a reflex, like a prayer. 

“I’m here, My Lord,” Sebastian murmurs, from the bedside. He’s bending over a cart, pouring a pitcher of steaming water into a wide-mouthed ceramic basin. Ciel watches, eyes tracing the familiar slope of his butler’s lower back, all his crisp black angles and lines. He notices that his vision is cloudy, and it creates the illusion of being lost in a dream or stuck behind a curtain, as if he’s watching Sebastian through very thin sheet of muslin backlit with sun. 

“What happened?” Ciel asks, reaching up to very gingerly touch the abrasion below his eye. He cringes and Sebastian notices, extending his own hand to encircle Ciel’s wrist and stop him from prodding at he damaged skin. Then, he brushes Ciel’s hair away, impossibly long, gloved fingers dancing over his brow, down to his chin, so near to his lips, always coming back up to thumb gently, gently over Ceil’s right eyelid. It seems like some misplaced memory, Sebastian touching him here. He is not sure why. 

“You were struck,” Is Sebastian’s answer. He stands upright again, picking up the saucer of warm water from the cart. Then, he sits carefully at the edge of the bed, leaning over Ciel.

“You are supposed to protect me,” Ciel mumbles, squinting as Sebastian dabs around his stinging eye with the corner of a damp cloth. 

He nods curtly. “I regret that you were injured, though there was no true threat to your life in that moment. Once I ascertained that there was, I took you back here.”

Ciel is confused. He cannot think. His head aches and Sebastian is on his bed, looming over his body, one hand against his own pale, weak shoulder, the other still prudently cleaning his wound. “Your gloves,” Ciel says suddenly, only half aware this time that he is thinking entirely too much about his Butler’s hands. “Remove them,” he orders. 

Sebastian pauses, examining either his own handiwork or Ciel’s stony expression. It’s hard to tell. “Very well” he says. Without unlocking his careful gaze, he eases the fingertip of his glove off of his middle finger with his teeth, bites, and pulls. Silk slides obscenely from skin, dropping into the sheets beside Ciel’s prone body. Ciel watches intently, sick with what feels like messy, misguided anger. He’s angry at Sebastian, for letting him get struck by some john in the East End. For carrying him around like is he a pekingese, for making him feel so small and helpless and _consumed_ , just as his soul will be one day. For sitting on the edge of his master’s bed instead of kneeling before it. For touching him so simply, so certainly, as if he were a plaything to be dressed and discarded, with _gloved_ hands. 

Ciel knows his eyes are flashing. He know’s his cheeks are florid, his breath is heaving. He knows all this, and all the while Sebastian is watching him very closely, smooth and unfazed, the frozen face of the Thames in winter. It hurts, makes his swollen eye throb.

Sebastian’s bare fingers caress the edge of Ciel’s jaw, down to the corer of his mouth, there they stay. “Is this what you want, my lord?” He asks in a low, quiet voice. His index finger with its nail tipped in black enamel slips easily into the slick, pink pout of Ciel’s mouth. 

The cloudiness dissipates, and Ciel’s heart clenches like a fist closing to strike. He cannot continue this, cannot trust himself to lie slack and panting and confused without humiliating himself somehow. It must end. 

He reaches up and slaps Sebastian’s hand off of him quick, hard. The resounding crack of it fills the room, the sound of burning, of gunshots. The hand stays poised in the air above them, and for a thrilling moment Ciel thinks Sebastian will strike him back. Or drop to touch him again, smoothing his hair, pushing into the softness of his bruise, brushing again and again across the closed lid of his marked eye like someone trying to read Braille. 

Instead, he merely lowers it and rests it upon his own thigh. Ciel breathes so hard his body quakes, aware that there’s sweat beading in the hollow of this throat, that he’s drawing his knees together to hide something. 

\---

Gradually, Ciel begins to notice the way Sebastian looks at him. Heatedly, carefully, with subtle undertones of what might be mockery. Amusement. “Are you planning on painting a portrait?” Ciel drawls without looking up one day as he opens his mail, aware that Sebastian’s gaze is burning holes through his dress shirt, his flesh, his bones. 

“I not a painter, young master. Merely one hell of a butler,” Sebastian reminds him. 

Ciel almost smiles, a nearly imperceptible twitch of his lips directed at the mahogany desk top. The truth is that he _adores_ being examined with such close, hungry scrutiny by his butler. It makes him feel real, realized. It makes him aware of the way he walks and moves, places purpose into his steps and the way he tilts his head, holds his hands, twists the ring around his finger in the pantomime of idleness. It makes him feel less black and filthy about the time he has spent staring at Sebastian. He is still confused by the meaning of all this, but at least his heightened awareness has drawn attention to what could be mutuality. He owns Sebastian, watches Sebastian unfalteringly. Such close inspection has led him to conclude that Sebastian, too, is guilty of watching, if only over the part of Ciel which is his. _Who owns who?_ He wonders, over and over. 

He shifts his weight in his chair, sighing at the small mountain of invitations and requests and business letters. All the while he can feel Sebastian’s eyes continue to rove over him, lingering particularly on the curve of his cheek, which was pressed into his hand in a gesture of grand boredom. Ciel loves that even though he chided Sebastian, he is still looking. It’s almost as if he cannot stop, as if he is starving and Ciel is the mirage of sustenance trembling on the horizon. 

Sebastian’s gaze feels, to Ciel, to be motivated by such things. Longing, starvation. It gives him chills to imagine Sebastian yearning for his soul, _hungering_ for it. Of course, Sebastian is not actually controlled by his hunger. Ciel revels in the glee and disgust of being so closely examined, yes, but the illusion of Sebastian being unable to control himself is merely Ciel’s own fantasy. He knows this. He _wants_ Sebastian to hunger for him so maddeningly that he cannot stop looking, that he acts without being ordered. That way, Ciel does not have to take responsibility for the things he desires from Sebastian. The absurd, shameful things he could never ask for. 

“Why do you stare so?” he sighs dramatically, side-eyeing Sebastian though his own hair, fingers folding a letter crisply in half. 

“I was only wondering what you were thinking, Young Master. You appear troubled. Does that letter bear bad news?” Sebastian asks. 

Ciel wavers with a surge of boyish doubt. Does Sebastian study him with such intensity, or does he only _wish_ to be the subject of Sebastian’s study? He looks up, lips pursed defiantly, and rips the letter in half. “You said once you think of my soul often. Did you mean that you hunger for it? That looking at me makes you hungry, just as a human surveying the contents of his dinner plate would make his mouth water?” 

Sebastian’s face does not change, but he stays quiet for a few moments, as if in deep thought. Eventually, he clears his throat. “I only meant that I think of your soul as a work of art, one ever-changing as you approach your goals and cultivate your darkness. To elaborate upon your metaphor, looking upon you you is less like looking upon a meal as a diner, and more like cooking a meal as a chef. It’s not that I cannot wait to taste you, but I do know you will be, in part by my own hand, delicious.” 

Ciel’s black eye and swollen cheek have long since healed, but he suddenly feels very dizzy again. He flattens damp palms onto his desk top, forcing himself to continue to lock eyes with Sebastian even though he wants desperately to look away, disappear into his rising flush. There are moments when he becomes overwhelmingly aware that Sebastian is a demon, is a man, ageless and wise and terrible, where he is nothing but a boy. This is one of them. 

“My lord. Your tea,” Sebastian adds, indicating the leaves have steeped long enough. 

\---

Ciel cannot forget Sebastian’s words. _It’s not that I cannot wait to taste you_ like a metronome inside of him, over and over again. He acts surly and distant for the remainder of the day, constantly feeling as if his clothes are too tight, as if the mansion is too warm, as if his skin is too young and treacherous to be trusted. 

That night, as Sebastian helps him into his nightshirt, Ciel decides he must address the storm, lest its eddies and thunderclaps keep him wakeful all night. Standing with his back to Sebastian as he pushes his arms clumsily through his sleeves, Ciel takes a deep, shuddering breath and grinds out, “I have devoted much thought to our conversation this morning.” 

“As have I,” Sebastian answers, gently turning Ciel to face him so that he can button up his bed clothes. 

“What about?” Ciel almost snaps, feeling defensive and guarded and still entirely too warm. 

“Your soul,” Sebastian says, without further elaboration. 

Ciel’s line of vision at present consists of Sebastian’s double-breasted waistcoat, and the chain of his silver pocket watch hanging in a delicate parabola. He wants to reach out and take it between his teeth, he wants to collapse against Sebastian’s flat, hard stomach and sob in grief and confusion and love. Instead, asks without looking up, “Do you hunger for it? It is a simple question.” His voice is shaking, and he loathes himself and Sebastian equally for this. 

“Yes,” Sebastian tells him, resting his hands upon Ciel’s shoulders, gripping him there, holding him in place. “But I can wait.” 

Ciel swallows a thickness in his throat. “Do you also hunger for other things?” He twists out of Sebastian’s grip, beginning to pace, feeling like a train hurtling towards inevitable derailment, brakeless and steam-scalding. 

“I do enjoy my own pastries, though I would not say crave them,” Sebastian says evenly, folding his arms and watching Ciel orbit him frantically. 

“No, no,” Ciel’s voice is impatient and raw. He’s not sure what’s happening, where this is going, but he has to _know_. He has to quench this infuriating curiosity, he has to see the end of his long and twisting hallway. “Other things of _mine_. As you wait for my soul, do you hunger for...do you think of...”

In one inhumanly long stride, Sebastian is upon him. Sweeping him off the ground, into his arms, and against the wall. Ciel’s head nearly smacks against the molding behind him, but Sebastian’s wide hand is cradling it, so Ciel has nothing to cry out in pain for, but still, he cries out. 

Sebastian’s rubs his face into Ciel’s impossibly smooth cheek, breath hot and labored against his ear, fingers tangling within the silken mess of his hair. Ciel holds on like someone clutching rubble at sea, at the mercy of Sebastian’s shipwreck. He doesn’t know what’s happening, but the whole of his young body is longing, pressing, grinding against Sebastian like his is what he wanted all along. “Your gloves,” he manages to hiss, head falling back to expose the line of his throat to Sebastian’s mouth, swift, soft, infernally hot. “Take them off,” he orders. 

“Yes, my Lord,” Sebastian rumbles against his pulse. 

\---

They end up on the bed, Sebastian laying him out like a prize won on a hunt. His hands seem to cover all of Ciel, containing him and molding him, pushing his shirt up to his neck and spreading him across the sheets to be devoured. The drag of bare skin over bare skin, uninhibited a layer of fabric feels like owning and being owned one thousand times over, distilled down into a single sublime sensation. Sebastian mouths up Ciel’s narrow chest, using his teeth and his tongue and his lips. 

Ciel writhes, twisting and gasping and sobbing with the overwhelm of it all. He’s not sure if he likes it; it feels too good and hurts to much. He is used to the simplicity of pleasure being denied while he bathes in hate, and this is an excess if both. He’s not sure if he likes it, but he wants it desperately, wants to die by it, wants to drown in it. Sebastian’s bare hands are like baptism, and in this moment Ciel feels holy. 

Sebastian’s mouth uses his stomach, his ribs, his collar bones. When he aligns their faces once again, he immediately moves his lips to Ciel’s marked eye, moving his tongue in soft, warm circles over the lid, thumbing the brow. Then he breaks away, using his index finger to hold that eye open for a moment, so that he can stare. 

Ciel is stunned to see how blown apart Sebastian looks, his usually snow-pale and stoic butler disheveled and red-cheeked, lips wet and swollen from their path up Ciel’s flesh. It moves him to see Sebastian more undone than he is after battle, and he sucks in desperate lungfuls of their combined breath, eyes hazy and streaming with tears. 

“Are you alright?” Sebastian asks, voice dangerous, lips moving against Ciel’s cheek and miraculous hands cupped on either side of his face, keeping him from twisting out of the intensity of their held gaze.

“Yes,” Ciel struggles out, half-lying, but wanting so profoundly for Sebastian to continue.

“It’s my purpose to protect you,” Sebastian reminds him, wiping Ciel’s tears with his thumbs, pushing hair from his eyes and behind his ears as his hips grind against Ciel’s small body with bone shattering force. 

Ciel can’t breathe, not really, but he manages to wheeze. “Finish what you started,” shifting up his hips to rub against Sebastian’s stomach, thigh, whatever he trapped so solidly beneath. “That’s an order.” 

Sebastian makes a sound that is not words, half groan half laugh, well beyond human. It is what Ciel imagines hell sounds like, and is makes him shudder helplessly in longing beneath the crushing weight of Sebastian’s long, lean body. It is the last thing he hears before Sebastian grips Ciel’s delicate chin within his fingers, and kisses him like a galaxy expanding into the void. 

At first, Ciel just lets it happen. Lets his mouth be filled and licked apart, lets his lips be bitten and sucked and bruised. Then, as Sebastian lets go for seconds to let him breathe, he starts meeting him halfway, following him up as he pulls away, _no, stop, get back here_ , repeating in desperate, staccato notes in his head. He gets infuriated that Sebastian always wins, so he starts slipping his tongue past Sebastian’s lips, licking his teeth mindlessly, experimentally. He starts to feel empty if he’s not tasting Sebastian’s mouth, drinking from it. It stops feeling like kissing, and starts to feel like breathing. 

Sebastian keeps touching him _nearly_ all over, raking his painted nails up and down Ciel’s pale sides, drawing raised pink marks to the surface like a map from Ciel’s throat to his hipbones. However, Ciel is quite aware that Sebastian has not yet touched him between his legs, the center of the surging, maddening, consuming heat extinguishing every thing around them, every intelligent thought in his brain. He keeps trying to push himself into the warmth of his hand, his body, anything, but Sebastian keeps _not letting him_. He finally lets out a long, frustrated sound into their kiss, and Sebastian swallows it with a low laugh. 

Then he breaks away completely, letting Ciel thump to the mattress in a boneless mess, confused and easily manipulable. Sebastian poses him like a doll, flipping his small, pliant body over onto his stomach and spreading his thighs with his own knee. Ciel would be outraged at such treatment if he was thinking clearly, but he’s not, he’s not thinking at all. He whimpers, thrusting against the bed, arching his back, wanting, wanting, wanting. What, he does not know. He only knows he _wants_. Sebastian then slings himself low over over Ciel’s back, kissing up his neck, his jawline. Ciel cannot settle into the bed, he keeps shivering up and into Sebastian’s chest, seeking heat and contact like someone blind. 

Sebastian pushes two long, white fingers easily into Ciel’s sloppy mouth, collecting spit. Ciel thinks nothing of this act, what it means, where it’s going. He is only so pitifully thrilled to have Sebastian's bare fingers between his lips and under his tongue that he sucks hungrily, dissolutely, feeling like this one filthy thing is all the proof of their contract he’s always wanted. 

Sebastian leaves a string of drool clinging to Ceil’s lips as he pulls out, so he leans in and licks it away. The world feels as if it has dissolved around Ciel, leaving him thrashing and grinding into blackness, smothered beneath the vast weight of Sebastian’s wings. There is nothing but this, nothing but sensation, a sharp pain and a slow burn as Sebastian eases one finger deep inside of him, the whole of his past and future whittled down to this one moment. It is only one long, wide-knuckled and perfect finger, but Ceil feels impossibly full. He stills, sobbing in great dry wracks, rubbing his face mindlessly into the sheets as Sebastian patiently works him open around his finger.

 

“Sebastian,” Ciel rips out, throat twitching around the only word with any meaning left in his consciousness. “More.” 

“Yes, My Lord,” Sebastian murmurs into Ciel’s ear. 

\---

Ciel awakens with his body aching everywhere, and Sebastian curled around him an oyster fashioning a pearl. He feels like a violin tucked beneath his butler’s chin, spruce and ebony and catgut pulled tight and musical. He wants to stay here, but Sebastian is already loosening his grip, releasing him. 

“Sebastian?”he murmurs, disoriented. 

“I’m here,” Sebastian answers, combing fingers smoothly through Ciel’s hair. 

There are no illusions, no ways for Ciel to wonder if last night was a dream or hallucination, because the evidence is all over his flesh, as certain as constellations. He rolls over onto his back and stares down at the flecked purple galaxies dotting his sternum, the milky-way of lightly scabbed scratches crisscrossing all over his thighs and ribs like he ran through brambles. Of course, most sensational is the raw ache deep within him from being felt from the inside out, played like a violin. He inhales raggedly, the force of it shaking his body like breath after hours spent weeping. He can feel Sebastian’s eyes studying the same collection of marks. 

“How are you feeling, Young Master?” Sebastian asks, stretching out beside Ciel like a cat, resting one of his blissfully still-bare hands on Ciel’s cheek. 

“Sore,” Ceil answers curtly, twisting out from the hand lest it reignite him completely. He cannot think if he reignites, and he needs to think right now, just for a moment, just to orient himself in this sea of stars. 

Sebastian’s eyes are dark and unreadable. “I hope I did not push you too far. It was not my intention to push you any further than you already desire to be pushed, or to cause you any pain beyond that which you already crave,” he explains, fingertips tracing lightly down the soft, pale line of Ciel’s throat. 

“Of course not,” Ciel says stubbornly. But he is shaking beneath Sebastian’s moving hand. Ciel realizes that he has rarely seen Sebastian in anything other than the various three piece suits he wears as a butler, and certainly has not seen him in any state of undress, but Sebastian is currently sprawled in _his_ bed, in nothing but his trousers. Ciel stares at the segments of cool, white muscle in his stomach, the stretch of his skin over them like marble, hardened moonlight. Ciel wants desperately to reach out and touch, but instead, he makes a fist. He is still shaking. 

Sebastian grants him a small smile, followed by a nod. He slides his hand down, tracing one particularly vivid pink mark from the hollow in Ciel’s throat down to his navel, retracing the path he drew last night. “I would very much like to continue pushing you,” he says quietly. 

Ciel’s heart thunders. A miraculous feeling, seeing as it seemed to him before last night he may not have a heart at all. He studies Sebastian, who is leaning in so very close to him. Sebastian’s ageless face, his dark lashes and peaked lips, the fine, almost translucent hair visible in the morning light dusting down his neck and shoulders. He has to remind himself that he is not human, not like him at all. Ciel nods, voice caught in his throat until it finally stumbles out, “Do I have any prior obligations today I must address?” 

Sebastian shakes his head. “I cancelled your lessons. I thought you might need some time for recovery.” He says, inching his palms onto Ciel’s narrow thighs. Before Ciel can respond, Sebastian is parting those thighs, holding him spread like a butterfly tacked to a cork-board, a wishbone poised to crack. Ciel lets him, sinking further into the bed, hands spasming to Sebastian’s oil slick hair, where they make fists. 

Aligning himself between Ciel’s spread legs, Sebastian’s lips revisit all the places he marked last night. He kisses each bruise, licks the sting from each bite. It hurts. Pain layered upon pain, too much and not enough and Ciel is already thrashing in frustration, wanting more, wanting to _breathe_. “Sebastian,” he growls, hating how his hips are being held down, how he can’t get move, how small and helpless he feels at Sebastian’s mercy. His throat swells and his eyes fill with the inevitable deluge of overwhelm, and as he squints and the tears spill over, Sebastian is there to lick them up.

“Young Master,” Sebastian says, sighing into Ciel’s mouth. “Before last night, I had never known you to weep.” 

Ciel kicks and wracks uselessly. He’s outraged that Sebastian would even _think_ to point out such a thing, but he can’t say anything about it because Sebastian is biting his lips, choking him silent and he’s powerless to do anything but kiss back. 

The truth is that Ciel did not know _himself_ to weep before this storm. He did not know himself to _feel_ , at all, beyond his own rage and despair, his own quest for vengeance. He forgot how to smile, how to laugh, how to cry. But here, beneath the fury of Sebastian’s bare hands, he is a crumbling dam. Oceans and of sensation, seasoning his soul. all rushing forth and into Sebastian’s ever-swallowing mouth. 

They break the kiss, and Ciel is left gasping, wet-faced and stunned. Dragging his palms down his pale, heaving chest, Sebastian easily manipulates Ciel’s body to where he wants it. Pushes him in half, slinging his skinny legs over his own shoulders. Ciel is half-embarrassed that his butler is rubbing his face into the smooth, intimate pallor of his inner thigh, but it’s a short-lived feeling blacked out entirely by an explosion of nervy, invasive pleasure, edging on pain. It feels like drowning, like falling. Ciel cries out, half-thrusting into, half squirming away from Sebastian’s hot, slick, sucking mouth, but he is held fast within his bruising grip. 

Sebastian can fit the whole of him in his mouth. His tiny shaft and the hairless sack beneath it, twitching and slippery as Ciel jerks and writhes wildly beneath him. His nose is pushed up against Ciel’s smooth skin and the dark, downy patch of hair above his pubic bone, fresh and pubescent. Ciel feels devoured, consumed, swallowed, the muscles in his stomach clench involuntarily as his spine roles like something seismic. Sebastian patiently sucks, lashing his tongue all around the sloppy mouthful of flesh, hands kneading spasming thighs. Just when it is about to be too much, and Ciel is wavering on the edge of consciousness, Sebastian lets him go, releasing his adolescent cock with an obscene sound. 

Ciel stares at him with half-lidded eyes flashing above cheeks hectic with color, limbs askew and body twitching. Sebastian kneels above him and unbuttons his trousers, eyes still fixed between Ciel’s spread legs, where he is swollen and glistening with spit. Ciel has not seen Sebastian with his clothes off. He has not even really imagined it, what it would be like to do things to Sebastian like Sebastian is doing to him. The idea sends a pang of terror to his gut, but it’s a thrilling kind of terror, a devilish anticipation. He licks his lips, shaking hand moving to feel himself, wet and stinging and sensitive. He wants anything Sebastian can give him, everything. He wants to be ripped apart and torn to bits since he cannot contain all of Sebastian’s flesh within his own. 

Sebastian is kissing him again, grinding atop him with a pressure and insistence which steals Ciel’s breath, forces it from him in desperate huffs. Ciel can feel his erection, fire-hot and steel-hard, pressing into his own soft stomach, as wide as own forearm, at least. Ciel’s hands, formerly clasped vice tight on Sebastian’s perspiration slicked shoulders, unclench. He tries to reach between their bodies, anxious to touch, but Sebastian is lightening quick and grabs his wrist mid air, forcing it back down to the pillows. 

Ciel grits his teeth, annoyed, frustrated, lost. Sebastian is teasing against him, just rutting against the hollow of his hip, the concave of his stomach. Then, he takes his free arm and hooks one of Ciel’s knees into the crook of his elbow, again spreading his legs, exposing him where he is hard and wet and twitching and debauched. Sebastian aligns himself, and thrusts. Their cocks slide together, Sebastian’s thick and red and adult, Ciel’s nearly nothing in comparison. 

The friction sends Ciel back into his tunnel of rage and static, and Sebastian’s name scrapes out of him, wrecked and wrecking and pathetic in its devotion. _Who owns who?_ Ciel thinks brokenly, one raw open nerve ground asunder by Sebastian’s inhuman grace. 

Ciel comes unexpectedly, sudden and white-hot, sticky and twitching but mostly dry, because Ciel is a young thirteen. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him, but he cedes to it, bucking and hissing and riding. Sebastian groans against his chaotic pulse as he does it, one low, long note like he has been waiting for this, longing for it, hungering for it for the endless stretch of time during which he has been alive, and hungry. 

As Ciel comes down, a dazzling mess of static and color dematerializing behind his eyelids, Sebastian reaches down to where they are joined and collects the thin, clear precum and pubescent ejaculate from Ciel’s wilting cock with his fingers. Then, as he sits back on his knees and gazes upon his master, he cleans them with his tongue. 

Sebastian lays beside Ciel’s limp body once he’s done, and curls the small frame into his own like a violin made to fit beneath his chin. 

\---

 

Things do not change as much as Ciel expects them to change. Sebastian still irritates him; it’s still his own fault; he still knows this. But there are at least reprieves in the formerly eternal-seeming stretches of madness, there is at least a collection of images he stores in his solar plexus of Sebastian pulling his gloves from his hands with teeth, the mark on the right a revelation each time. There is at least a salve for the burn of confusion, if he seeks it out. 

The strangest novelty in all this is how he now feels his heart beat, steady and real in his chest, like something once forgotten and only recently remembered. Sometimes, at his desk or as he sits at the head of the table awaiting the first course of his dinner, he’ll get startled by the sensation of movement in his chest, and inch a hand onto his own breast to feel it and count the beats. Other times, when he is drifting to sleep against the quiet, terrible solidity of another body beside him, Sebastian will do it for him, covering the whole of his chest and sternum with one wide, bare palm. 

It hurts, and it absolves. It is one of many confusing and somewhat humiliating things Ciel has felt in his short, blood spattered life, but for right now, he’s curious enough about it that he will endure it. Even long for it, in the hours before he retires to bed when Sebastian teases him, makes him crazy, makes him wonder if he’s inventing a whole set of memories to explain the never-fading assortment of bite marks on his pale shoulders. By the time he does retire and Sebastian blows out the candles and finds Ciel’s lips in the dark, he is more than relieved to tumble into the sway of it.

Now, Ciel sits in his chair, Sebastian beside him, like always. Sebastian is preparing tea and Ciel watches him intently, unabashedly, a smirk turning up the corner of his mouth and his cheek resting on his knuckles, head cocked. Sebastian narrows his gaze at him, finishing off the teacup with an elegant tilt of his wrist. 

“You seem troubled, young master,” Sebastian ventures. 

Ciel closes his eyes. “No,” he says. Blind, he reaches up to his throat and unties his cravat, unbuttons his collar, and pulls it all open, revealing a slip of white chest. He can hear Sebastian's sharp, offended intake of breath, and his own stomach lurches with the thrill of power this gives him. He then unties his eyepatch, which slithers to the dark like something made from shadows., and looks at Sebastian. 

He loves seeing Sebastian wide-eyed, with color on his cheeks. _I own you_ , he thinks triumphantly, tugging the open neck of his shirt low enough to show Sebastian marks that he has left on him, teeth, nails, suction, pressure, everything. “Will you examine the sore spot for me? It seems I have an ache.” he orders lightly, extending his neck. 

Sebastian takes his time in pulling off his gloves, brows drawn tight and mouth set into firm line for a moment before it all easily slips away, leaving his face its usual placid, icy surface. Ciel watches, each long finger, each point of the pentagram. 

He moves so that he’s behind Ciel’s chair, bent over him like a guardian angel. “Certainly,” he replies, flexing his fingers before cracking his knuckles. Ciel watches, rapt, at the whir of white and black like the flutter of hummingbird wings. He flinches as Sebastian finally touches him, grazing one solitary bruise with his index finger before sliding his hand firmly under Ciel’s shirt, all the way down to his navel, across his startled, tensing abdominals. He gasps, eyes flying open. 

With his lips at Ciel’s ear, Sebastian asks, “Here?”

Ciel’s cheeks are hot, all of him is hot. He tries to squirm away from the cool insistence of Sebastian’s palm, and instead cants himself up into his opening mouth, the stuttering heat of his breath. And he would never think such things in a moment of clarity, he wouldn’t even _dream_ of it, he would shudder at the very notion. But as Sebastian mouths up his jaw, digging nails into his soft stomach, Ciel thinks _You own me_ , twisting in his chair, making small, hungry, indignant noises. _You do_. 

Sebastian stands, releasing Ciel completely, leaving him shivering and furious and shamed. “Yes, my lord,” he says. And he smiles. 

\---


End file.
